from the there-are-limits,-people dept

Even a notoriously patent-friendly court like the district court in East Texas has admitted that there are limits to what's patentable. Notorious patent troll Uniloc, whose name has been appearing quite frequently lately, has lost one part of its big cases, against Rackspace, after the district court in Tyler, Texas has said one of the patents in question in this lawsuit, US Patent 5,892,697 on a "Method and apparatus for handling overflow and underflow in processing floating-point numbers," is really patenting basic mathematical functions, and you can't do that.

Claim 1, then, is merely an improvement on a mathematical formula. Even when tied to computing, since floating-point numbers are a computerized numeric format, the conversion of floating-point numbers has applications across fields as diverse as science, math, communications, security, graphics, and games. Thus, a patent on Claim 1 would cover vast end uses, impeding the onward march of science.

While this is nice, this is just one patent in that particular lawsuit, and Uniloc has dozens of other patents that it's using in other lawsuits. And Uniloc shows no signs of slowing down. Just the other day it filed 12 new lawsuits.

from the aren't-things-bad-enough? dept

It would be something of an understatement to say that people have strong opinions about patents. But as Techdirt has reported, there's a growing consensus that software patents in particular aren't working -- James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer have written an entire book, "Patent Failure", about how bad things are there, and why it's happening in this area rather than elsewhere.

One of the key problems is that software patents are essentially patents on mathematical algorithms -- sets of instructions for carrying out a calculation. Since it has long been a principle that you can't patent mathematical formulae or laws of nature, there is a tension there: if software is just mathematics, why should you be able to patent it at all? New Scientist points to an interesting article in the April 2013 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society, in which David A. Edwards
proposes a radical way of solving that conundrum (pdf):

At present, only those things which are made by man are patentable. Thus, the courts have allowed new forms of bacteria which have been engineered to have useful properties using recombinant DNA techniques to be patented but would not allow such a bacterium to be patented if it were naturally occurring even if it were newly discovered. This is the basis for the nonpatentability of computer programs. They are algorithms, which are essentially mathematical formulas, which -- as everyone knows -- are "eternal" and hence discovered by man and not created by him. This argument which, to say the least, is philosophically controversial, leads to our present unfortunate policy. From an economic point of view, there is no rationale for distinguishing between discovery and invention, and we would advocate dropping entirely any subject matter restrictions whatsoever on what can be patented. One should be able to patent anything not previously known to man.

In particular, he believes it should be possible to patent mathematics, and hence software.

One of his arguments is that this would spur people to make more discoveries. But that presupposes mathematicians aren't trying to do that now for glory, peer esteem and tenure, but there's no evidence to suggest that. The same argument is sometimes made in support of software patents -- that they stimulate the production of more software. But that overlooks the fact that the computer industry thrived for decades before the introduction of software patents, and that companies like Microsoft grew into hugely profitable enterprises without them.

In a memo to his senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." Mr. Gates worried that "some large company will patent some obvious thing" and use the patent to "take as much of our profits as they want."

In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years -- an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions. Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings.

That's bad enough for huge companies with deep pockets; it would be even worse for universities on tight budgets which might suddenly find themselves sued for using mathematical formulae without permission -- a ludicrous situation. Edwards seems to be aware that this is a problem, and tries to address it as follows:

Since patents only give control over the commercial applications of his or her discovery or invention to the patentee, granting patents on mathematical formulas, laws of nature, and natural phenomena would have no negative side effects on pure science.

In 2002, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit dramatically limited the scope of the research exemption in Madey v. Duke University, 307 F.3d 1351, 1362 (Fed. Cir. 2002). The court did not reject the defense, but left only a "very narrow and strictly limited experimental use defense" for "amusement, to satisfy idle curiosity, or for strictly philosophical inquiry." The court also precludes the defense where, regardless of profit motive, the research was done "in furtherance of the alleged infringer's legitimate business." In the case of a research university like Duke University, the court held that the alleged use was in furtherance of its legitimate business, and thus the defense was inapplicable.

Clearly, there is huge scope for inventive lawyers (mathematical trolls?) to bring lawsuits against academics here, which would inevitably have a chilling effect on "pure science". Far from helping resolve the problems we have today with software patents, extending patentability to the mathematics that underlies programming would simply spread the misery wider, and make the lawyers richer.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Math geeks rejoice! It's Pi Day again! Why is the number pi so awesome? Because, as Mr. Spock once explained, "the value of pi is a transcendental figure without resolution." Here are a few more cool pi-related links.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

International math tests seem to consistently show that Americans don't have competitive math skills. We can argue that these tests don't measure real-life capabilities, but it might also be nice to see math test scores rise someday. Given the growth of online educational tools, the accessibility of good (and effective) math lessons will hopefully help to improve everyone's math talents. Here are just a few interesting links on the topic of math.

from the patenting-counting... dept

Ah, it really was just recently that we were talking about the seminal Supreme Court case, Gottschalk v. Benson, in which the Justices made it clear that you cannot just patent an algorithm that converts numbers:

It is conceded that one may not patent an idea. But in practical effect that would be the result if the formula for converting BCD numerals to pure binary numerals were patented in this case. The mathematical formula involved here has no substantial practical application except in connection with a digital computer, which means that if the judgment below is affirmed, the patent would wholly pre-empt the mathematical formula and in practical effect would be a patent on the algorithm itself.

I'm reminded of that, after seeing Dealbreaker's headline about how world famous mutual fund investor, Bill Gross, of PIMCO, has patented the methodology for his bond fund -- or, as Dealbreaker correctly points out, he "patented a way to count." Indeed, the patent in question, US Patent 8,306,892 is somewhat hideous, describing not much more than the concept of an algorithm that weights regions based on GDP. The key claim:

A computer-implemented method of managing a fixed income financial index, the method comprising: storing in a computer memory a regional weight for each of a plurality of regions of the world, each of the regional weights based at least in part on a gross domestic product for the region; storing in a computer memory, for each of the plurality of regions, a category weight for each of a plurality of categories of fixed income financial instruments issued from the region; storing in a computer memory asset data for a universe of fixed income instruments representing each of the plurality of categories of instruments in each of the plurality of regions, the fixed income instruments comprising one or more of the following: (i) fixed income securities, (ii) fixed income derivatives, or (iii) fixed income forwards; programmatically allocating, via execution of instructions by one or more computer processors, one or more constituent instruments from the universe of fixed income instruments to each of the plurality of categories in each of the plurality of regions; programmatically determining a constituent weight for each of the constituents allocated to each of the plurality of categories in each of the plurality of regions; programmatically calculating a subindex for each of the plurality of categories in each of the plurality of regions, each subindex based at least in part on the allocated constituents and the respective constituent weights, wherein the constituent weights for a first subindex comprise market capitalization weights and the constituent weights for a second subindex comprise gross-domestic product weights; and programmatically transforming the subindices, the category weights, and the regional weights into a value for the financial index.

It doesn't take a patent specialist to figure out that this is basically patenting a spreadsheet for weighting countries on a few different factors. It seems to be the exact kind of thing that was disallowed by the Supreme Court under Gottschalk v. Benson. And yet, the USPTO waved it right on through. Kinda makes you wonder what the hell patent examiner Samica L. Norman was thinking in approving such a ridiculous patent.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Math might not be the easiest subject for some students, but there might be different ways of teaching it that could make it more tolerable for kids. The more we learn about how our brains process math problems, the better we can teach ourselves how to tackle math education. There's a lot of concern over how Americans can compete in a global economy if our kids don't have some pretty basic math skills. Maybe some of these findings will help students pick up some much needed math skills.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Plenty of students in school don't like math. There's not much room to argue for points when grade school arithmetic is either wrong or right. With a better understanding of how our brains work, we might be able to devise some ways to make math more pleasant for everyone. At the very least, we can remind people to always show their work.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Technology has oftentimes advanced the weapons of war -- creating new ways to destroy things on increasingly larger scales. But as our ability to destroy has become ridiculously big, it's time to start looking for more efficient methods. Here are just a few military projects that are looking to improve targeted destruction.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Most of us have been taught to understand math-related topics in a linear way, but that might not be the way our brains are hard-wired. Kids actually tend to have an innate number scale that is logarithmic, so even though they know how to count to ten (or even twenty), they'll actually think more along the lines of one, many, lots of many's, and then OMG so many that's like infinity. Here are just a few links on logarithmic thinking to ponder.